The Chill Bill Contingency

Summer 2022. Maria tells me about a microfiction contest. Naïve me takes the bait. “A story in 400 words or fewer?! How could you even…” I trailed off.

My first attempt was “The Wind,” a sordid Hitchcock & Bradbury meet mutated-haiku tale set on an idylic college campus. It’s particularly terse, fewer than 300 words. Alas, the judges gave no extra credit for keeping it short. It didn’t win.

I started in on “The Chill Bill Contingency” next.

More ambitious, it dusts more ground in a few hundred words than a decent snowstorm could cover in hours, but who’s counting? The story wants to spread. Maybe I’ll expand it someday. I feel that way about most of my microfiction stories, which makes sense, I guess.

Anyhow, here it is, minuscule warts and all:

“The Chill Bill Contingency.”

400-Word Non-Award-Winning Microfiction

In the twenty-first century, Artificial Intelligence got good. Really good. But that didn’t stop the world from going to hell. On the cusp of the twenty-third century, we’re on the brink of collapse.

Time scientists task MAIVN, the world’s leading AI, to back-chain its way to the best insertion point. The answer is obvious (to the AI): prevent Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, almost two hundred years ago. It’s the linchpin upon which we manufactured this mess.

MAIVN’s predictive analysis presents several thousand plans of action ranging from the inelegant and uncertain (various tactical nuclear solutions at multiple points on the timeline) to a classic but risky assassination (a bullet through the skull of hawkish thug Vladimir Putin).

The emotionless AI gets a little fuzzy on the nuclear fallout, and when assassinations fail, desperate despots make things even worse.

Each jump opportunity offers strengths and deficiencies, myriad metrics, most of which the team doesn’t understand, and unlike the movies, AIs still haven’t learned how to explain themselves.

After two weeks deliberating the data while sequestered in one of the last safe places on the planet, we put plan “Chill Bill” into action.

Vladimir Putin‘s first exposure to the name Bill, it seems, had been from collegiate lessons briefly mentioning King William I, aka Billy The Conqueror. And this matters. Somehow.

MAIVN is confident.

Trusting the AI, controls calibrated to December 29, 1963, inaugural Temporal Agent Chang enters the pod with $100,000 in period-appropriate greenbacks and one goal:

Convince Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ leader Domingo Samudio to re-name the soon-to-be-recorded hit “Wooly Bully” to “Chilly Billy” instead.

Chang disappears.

In late 1968, precocious teen Vladimir Putin watches a smuggled copy of Bandits in Milan (aka The Violent Four) in a ramshackle underground Leningrad arthouse theater.

Later, still humming the catchy earworm from the film’s opening titles, young Vlad treks to the library and discovers the works of William “Билли” Shakespeare.

Shortly thereafter, Putin auditions for and then acts in a successful school play about a prominent 19th-century tsar-reformist.

Instead of studying German and law, Putin enrolls at Российский государственный институт сценических искусств, the oldest and largest theater school in Russia.

Putin’s brooding portrayals of usually troubled characters earn him accolades in the USSR, and he becomes the first actor from the former Soviet Union to earn an Academy Award.

Nobody blinks.

What was is no longer.

Time stumbles on.

End

---

Dan Dreifort is a lot of things. Cat-dad, noisemaker, gluton, digital comms consultant, biker, husband, volunteer, troublemaker, and wannabe microfiction writer. If you bug him, (and maybe if you don’t,) he’ll publish more super-short stories here. His biggest regret in that story above? Not making enough space to specify that Wooly Bully (aka Chilly Billy) is the music in the opening credits of Bandits in Milan. Or maybe he should trust readers’ ability to connect the dots? 2nd-biggest regret: jumping on the early LLM-hype bandwagon for a story!